QUIET AND TREMBLE
by Bei Dao
Translated by the author with the assistance of Chen Yan Bing and Diana
Jaio
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you are drawing yourself
being born--light's rising
turning the paper-night
madness that you released
is quiet cast by truth
pride shines as if internal wounds
darken all the words
in secret trembling
those angels in uniforms
of a private school
become fish, querying sea
a wind reads ruts
saluting the blue silk beyond
pain
An Unfamiliar Beach
--to P.
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Bei Dao
1
The sails have been lowered.
A winter forest of masts
contains unexpected sights and sounds of Spring.
2
The ruins of a lighthouse
still hold the great beams from the past.
You lean on the remaining stairs,
on the rusted banisters,
beating the same rhythm over and over.
3
In the dignity of high noon
our shadows look for temporary lodging.
All over the place
salt rock glistens, condensed and
sparkling with memories.
4
In the distance
there is a vast, white expanse.
The blue horizon
is like a moving deck.
How many nets have been cast?
5
A scarf,
like a red bird,
waves over the Sea of Japan.
It flings its imitation of fire
at this grey end of the world,
and at your fixed gaze.
An absence of storms is fine,
but there is also no direction and no wind.
Perhaps in answer to a call,
its wings thrum like a bowstring.
6
The ebbing tide
wave after wave,
spills on a golden carpet,
spills a night suffused with foam,
a lost rope, a broken oar.
Fishermen bend their naked backs
and repair the temple the storm collapsed.
7
Children chase a crescent moon.
A sea gull flies right for you,
but doesnt light on your outstretched hand.
The Boat with a Red Sail
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Bei Dao
If the ruins of the walls are all about,
how shall I insist
the only road is the one we're on?
Are you fooled into believing
the streetlights that fill the eyes
come out nightly like stars?
I won't deceive you anymore,
won't let your heart, like a trembling maple leaf,
be written all over with lies about Spring.
I can't comfort you anymore
because, after heaven and earth,
only time witnesses to our existence.
On the beach, where sands are pulverized darkness,
when the spray runs off our eye-lashes,
we see the sea behind it is boundless.
Still, however I want to say,
wait, girl,
wait for the boat with a red sail, that brings the wind.
An Ancient Temple
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Bei Dao
The long ago songs of a bell
weaved this spider web; in the column's crevices,
grown outward, one sees annual rings there for the counting.
No memories are here; stones
that merely scattered the echoes in this mountain valley,
have no memories.
That little path, even, by-passed it;
its dragons and strange birds are gone.
They took with them the silent bells that hung from the eaves.
They took the unrecorded legends of the place, too.
The words on the walls are all worn clean and torn.
Maybe if it caught on fire
one could read the words on the inside.
See the annual growths of the wild grasses,
so indifferent.
They don't care if they submit to any master,
to the shoes of the old monks,
or to the winds, either.
Out front the sky is held up by a broken stone tablet.
Still, led by the gaze of some living person,
the tortoise may revive and
come out carrying his heavy secret,
crawl right out there on the temple's threshold.
